Our website uses cookies to improve your user experience. If you continue browsing, we assume that you consent to our use of cookies. More information can be found in our Cookies Policy and Privacy Policy.

Guidos in revolt: Michael Cera’s new MTV promo

Sometimes it doesn’t seem like two great tastes will taste great together, but combining Michael Cera with the cast of “The Jersey Shore” turned out to be a winning strategy for MTV this week. The music network brought the emo film star to its studios this week to get some guido tips from the pros. The resulting images and video were leaked online to create maximum blowout for both Cera’s movie and MTV’s new hit show.

The producers of “Youth in Revolt” are heavily promoting their movie on MTV and the network apparently like the movie (and ad dollars) so much that they told Cera he could do “anything he wanted” to promote it on the air and online.

Apparently, Cera really wanted to get a blowout and hang out in a hot tub with the cast of “Jersey Shore.” In addition to all of the “Youth in Revolt” ads that are running during the show and their coverage of the film online, MTV now has great footage of their new stars hanging out with the quiet actor and covering him in tanner and hairspray.

MTV rolled out the images and video throughout the week online, and aired interstitials during commercial breaks of the cast hanging out with Cera and giving him lessons in guido life. The network hasn’t gotten back to me, so I can’t say whether they threw in the Jersey Shore/Michael Cera mashups as part of Youth in Revolt’s ad buy with the network or if they charged for the extra coverage, but either way it was a good idea.

But letting him hang around with Snookie, Pauly D and The Situation reminded audiences that he is funny and entertaining. Moreover, these sorts of adverts are going to become much more common place as content producers try to bring attention to their products in increasingly disperse environs. Consumers are bombarded with so many images and advetisements today that they have become experts at tuning out the noise.

By snagging people’s attention online, the film producers and MTV roped in audiences to watch their content. And unexpected images like Michael Cera with huge hair are just the kinds of things to get people to do something that seems like a lost activity today — watch commercials.

Recommended

Thirty billion – that’s a lot of videos. In fact, it’s an all-time record for videos viewed online in the U.S., when online video views actually approached a number closer to 31 billion in November. With over 12 billion videos viewed, Google sites accounted for the lion’s share of all that goggling. Overall, more than 170 million viewers watched an average 182 videos each.

comScore Video Metrix, which released these figures, also found Hulu achieving new highs with 924 million video views. The average Hulu viewer watched 21.1 videos that, another record for the property. Google video viewers watched an impressive 94.7 videos each on average, however it’s notable that the overwhelming majority of these were on YouTube, which generally tends to feature much shorter clips.

For those hoping for an advertising rebound in 2010, Interpublic’s Magna has some disheartening news. The trend tracking company expects ad spend to sink this quarter and rebound thereafter. But that means growth will remain stagnant for 2010. And after two miserable years for the ad market, that is not good news.

But on the bright side, this is a positive revision of the company’s previous numbers.

With all the focus on real-time information sharing, the next step in digital will be curating all of that content. And while companies from Google to Facebook are trying to get a handle on broadly organizing real-time information, one company is going niche and trying to corner the market on digital and real-time event sharing.

That company is Hot Potato, a service that connects people around live events in real time.

Hot Potato is betting that consumers will put a premium on having all of their event information in one place. The company is still in beta and has focused so far on its iPhone app and a soft digital launch, but Hot Potato raised $1.4 million in funding this fall and is set to launch a new suite of features in the next few weeks. The company has also earned praise from all the right places. (The New York Times calls Hot Potato a “promising solution,” while The Business Insider when so far as to dub Hot Potato “the next Twitter“).

Only time will tell if Hot Potato’s approach to digital event coverage catches on, but there’s certainly a lot of potential there. I caught up with the company’s CEO, Justin Shaffer, to talk about event sharing, Twitter’s failings for event organizers and where this all gets interesting for brands.

Companies are pouring billions of dollars a year into social media and influencer marketing campaigns, many of which target consumers on Facebook-owned Instagram, in an effort to parlay social engagement into sales.